Reyes / Multicultural Bildungsroman 147 MULTICULTURAL BILDUNGSROMAN Coming of Age between Han and Sana Maria Luisa Torres Reyes Ateneo de Manila University and the University of Santo Tomas [email protected] Abstract The paper explores ways in which the contemporary refunctioning of classical literary and cinematic genres might continue to provide vitality and relevance in building multi-faceted border-crossing societies such as multicultural communities. In the case of Korean hallyu cinema, Punch, the sleeper-hit film of 2011 about a Korean-Filipino character (“Kopino”), the “coming-of-age” genre is located at the nexus between the key features of the Bildungsroman and the project of multiculturalism in dominantly monocultural Korea. In the process of refunctioning, the aesthetics of the film is reworked from a narrative structured by the integrative logic of an individual’s development (Bildungsroman) into a political site for negotiation of contentious tensions (multiculturalism). As a “hybrid” Korean film characteristic of many products of the hallyu culture industry, at its contact zone is the Kopino (Korean-Filipino), the main protagonist, Wan-deuk, at which the structure of the Bildungsroman, the Korean han and the Filipino affect sana become resilient and dynamic if not always visible features that textually coalesce and collide in the process of “generic translocality,” multiplying the tensions and reframing the narrative structure. The result is the emergence of a refunctioned hybrid genre toward what might be called the “multicultural Bildungsroman” in Punch. Keywords Bildungsroman, contact zone, Filipino sana, hallyu, hybridity, Korean han, multiculturalism, refunctioning, translocality About the Author Maria Luisa Torres Reyes is Full Professor at the Ateneo de Manila University where she is currently Research Fellow, as well as Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Santo Tomas. She is the founding editor and editor emeritus of the widely indexed international journal, Kritika Kultura, author of Banaag at Sikat (2010), the award-winning book of literary criticism on the first socialist novel in Asia, andSipatSalin (2012), a collection of her poems and their translations in various foreign and local languages. In her international publications, her Kritika Kultura 28 (2017): –189 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/kk/> Reyes / Multicultural Bildungsroman 148 scholarly interests and publications include the exploration of the ways in which “Western” ideas and literary and critical categories like the theories of Bertolt Brecht, a major German theatre theoretician and practitioner, have been “refunctioned” in the Philippines and other non-Western contexts. Kritika Kultura 28 (2017): –189 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/kk/> Reyes / Multicultural Bildungsroman 149 INTRODUCTION The growing number of trans/multinational co-productions of films traversing Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China is said to have set the stage for the development of Korean cinema with a multinational character. In the midst of neoliberal globalization, a number of films have dealt with either “repatriated diasporas in Korea or Korean diasporas in foreign countries,” in the process, “re-nationalizing and de-nationalizing” what is referred to as “Korea”–that geographical, traditionally ethnocentric space. Described to be “ethno-socially centered and transnationally decentered” by cross-cultural processes, “inter-ethnic” dynamics have begun to mark its effort toward multiculturalism.1 Such dynamics are set in motion by films that have refunctioned “forms and instruments of production,” resulting in their “functional transformation,” for continuing dynamism and relevance of Korean cinema in this age of the hallyu (“Korean Cultural Wave”).2 In this regard, the sleeper-hit film Punch (2011) is instructive.3 This “coming- of-age” teeny-bopper genre is located at the nexus between the key features of the Bildungsroman, the novel of “formation” or “education,”4 and the on-going project of Korean multiculturalism. In this exploration, Punch is not meant to represent the hallyu phenomenon in general; rather, it is taken to be an instance of hallyu in its multifaceted reception, which specifically addresses the issue of multiculturalism. In this regard, therefore, the choice of the film is to be mainly illustrative rather than representative of hallyu productions dealing with multiculturalism. However, the paper does not interrogate audience reception in detail except for critical articulations which are deemed instructive for analysis; rather it wishes to focus on the dynamic tension in certain conjunctural moments in the film’s production and reception owing to what is described as a highly complex and multilayered formation that is composed of real, imagined, and hybrid cultural practice, a diverse range of lived experiences and sets of powerful discourses which exist at national, translocal, and transnational levels. (Lee Keehyeung 175) It has been said that Korean cinema nowadays plays an important role in “articulating discourse about multiculturalism within Korea’s borders” (Jooyeon Rhee, “Gendering Multiculturalism” 1). However, Korean state-sponsored multicultural policy has been criticized in a number of films for the stereotyping of foreigners, ethnic groups, patriarchy, and assimilationism rather than representing an expansive full-fledged multiculturalism—two contradictory tendencies that Punch navigates delicately often productively yet sometimes unevenly. Punch itself, for example, may be said to be illuminative of “postcolonial practice in South Korea that is, in many ways, complicit with dominant discourses such Kritika Kultura 28 (2017): –189 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/kk/> Reyes / Multicultural Bildungsroman 150 as nationalism, patriarchy, and global capitalism” in which the Filipino migrant wife depicts “passivity,” exhibiting “a sense of bellitlement and faceless subjectivity.” In addition, it has been analysed in terms of the plight of the young Kopino “in the context of a nation trying to advocate for multiculturalism yet still highly homogenous in the social construct of its people” (Taejun Yu; Sadorra). Nonetheless, it has also been pointed out that “[d]espite their problematic representation of ethnically and culturally different Others, these films articulated issues that advanced the multicultural discourse in ways that engaged both migrants and Koreans” (Jooyeon Rhee, “Gendering Multiculturalism” 2). Without being reductive of the film’s particularity in relation to the complex hallyu phenomenon in general in East Asia and beyond since the 1990s, this paper argues that the success of Punch lies not only in the inclusion of cultural content such as traditional values, topically, but beyond that, the constitutive role of ethos and affects play in its very framework. “Ethos” is generally understood to mean values and beliefs that constitute “a thread weaving through divergent social, economic, and political contexts rather than a static and essentialist norm” (Keumsil Kim and Williams 6). It is also understood to be the “characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations.”5 “Affect” is a slippery term that often refers interchangeably to emotions, feelings, sentiment, sensation, intensities, and pathos such as the Korean experience of han and the Filipino sana. In Affect Theory, which continues its dialogues regarding its basic categories, affect is suggestive of the breadth and depth of concepts pertaining to individual and collective identity shaped by “lived experience” and is often concerned with the study of “subjectivity and its vicissitudes.” (Leo). Affects are explored in order to help understand experiences that are said to be excluded from cognitive and conceptual representations, like bodily functions and sensations, among others, generally. Brian Massumi defines Affect/Affection: AFFECT/AFFECTION. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies). (xvi) The concern for the “affective turn,”6 in the case of Punch, is in its formal and structural inscription in aesthetic, ethical, and political questions involving multiculturalism in relation to a kind of generic transcoding through refunctioning (Clough 1-2). Kritika Kultura 28 (2017): –189 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/kk/> Reyes / Multicultural Bildungsroman 151 It is perhaps due to this process of generic transcoding that the apparent “loose structure” of the film has been cited to be a “problem.”7 Yet, it is this same structure that, in a sense, has allowed for the possibility of the telling of a multi-dimensional narrative of Korean multiculturalism within or alongside the conventional developmental logic of the western Bildungsroman as a genre. Although the film’s general arc remains recognizably compliant to the Bildungsroman’s major features, contrapuntal voices and virtual presences